Month: June 2017

When I was renovating houses I never knew how involved you could get in the job on a large scale where you are building a city. If I put in a sidewalk at your house, it was a simple process that did not need any more complex of a calculation than to estimate how many yards of concrete the job would take. Now in my capacity as a city engineer, I use civil engineering software to figure out things such as the shear strength of concrete retaining walls used on highways, or to check to see if the footer design of a new building meets our codes for construction of skyscrapers in the city.

Years ago my dad worked in an office where he used a slide rule to make calculations for the same sort of information. Now I have complex software that lets me simulate different construction scenarios to come up with a design plan that is economically feasible and safe. It is a delicate balance of safety, longevity, construction costs, maintenance and aesthetics for anything that gets built in the city. Continue reading Using Software As a City Engineer

I needed to look into scanning software after I finally made the leap from Windows 7 to Windows 10. I put it off as long as I could after reading a lot of stuff about how Windows 10 is loaded with deep state tracking software. Friends suggested I hang on to Windows 7 as long as possible, but in the last six months I knew I would be making the transition. The biggest issue is that, as far as I can tell, Microsoft pretty much quit supporting Windows 7. That meant my computer became more vulnerable to hackers, viruses, and malware.

Since I’ve got scads of files on my old computer, mostly pictures I don’t want to lose associated with my photography hobby, that meant the transition would likely take days as I migrated all the stuff over to the new hard drive. It also meant finding a new scanning software program because the old one I understood well and used didn’t have a version that worked with Windows 10. Continue reading Upgrading My Computer and Software